Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, (born Sept. 14, 1547, Amersfoort, Spanish Netherlands [now in the Netherlands]—died May 13, 1619, The Hague, Neth.), lawyer, statesman, and, after William I the Silent, the second founding father of an independent Netherlands. He mobilized Dutch forces under William’s son Maurice and devised the anti-Spanish triple alliance with France and England (1596). In the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609) he reaffirmed Holland’s dominant role in the Dutch republic.

Early career

Oldenbarnevelt studied law at Leuven (Louvain), Bourges, and Heidelberg (where his ultimate conversion to Protestantism first germinated) and, probably, Padua. After his return to the Netherlands he settled down as an advocaat (“counsel”) at the Hof van Holland, which was effectively the court of appeal for the province of that name, established at The Hague.

When, in 1572, two of the Netherlands provinces, Holland and Zeeland, succeeded in shaking off the Spanish rule from Brussels, Oldenbarnevelt did not follow the Court of Appeal, which fled to Utrecht, but decided to throw in his lot with the movement of national liberation. He even took part in an attempt to relieve the besieged towns of Haarlem and Leiden. In 1576 he was appointed pensionary (chief executive) of Rotterdam, an office that automatically implied membership of the provincial states (assembly), and, when the national revolt had spread to the other provinces, frequent attendance at the States-General in Brussels or Antwerp. In 1578, when a total reconquest by the Spanish armies under the leadership of Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, threatened, Oldenbarnevelt was one of the negotiators of the Union of Utrecht (concluded January 1579), which was to serve as a kind of makeshift constitution for the United Provinces until 1795. During the negotiations, it became apparent that Oldenbarnevelt was aiming at securing for Holland the politically unassailable position to which the strategically all-but-unassailable province considered itself entitled after having borne the brunt of the revolt alone with Zeeland for nearly seven years. These activities also brought him into fairly close contact with William the Silent.

Political leadership

In 1586, two years after William’s assassination, Oldenbarnevelt accepted the appointment by the States of Holland as the province’s landsadvocaat (chief minister); in this office he became the real trustee of William the Silent’s political inheritance. While the latter’s son, Maurice of Nassau, a brilliant military commander, was in charge of the actual warfare in the field, it was Oldenbarnevelt who, at first in close collaboration with him, mobilized and coordinated the country’s available energy and resources, thus making warfare possible. As one of these activities, he took an active part in the founding of the Dutch East India Company.

Although theoretically a servant of only one out of seven sovereign provinces, Oldenbarnevelt, who himself undertook several diplomatic missions to France and England, was virtually the union’s foreign secretary. In this capacity, too, it was he who continued the work of William the Silent and succeeded in integrating the somewhat suspicious, politically unorthodox new commonwealth of rebels. In this respect, his greatest triumph was the conclusion of a full-fledged triple alliance with France and England in 1596.

Oldenbarnevelt’s main achievement in the field of foreign policy was, however, the so-called Twelve Years’ Truce, concluded in 1609 after long-protracted negotiations, by which the original national program of ousting the Spaniards from the whole of the Netherlands was virtually abandoned and the northern commonwealth of the seven provinces established as such.

On the other hand, it was also in this achievement that the all-pervading flaw in Oldenbarnevelt’s position as the union’s leading statesman became apparent—namely, the very circumstance that he was pledged by oath to only one out of those seven provinces, the province of Holland. Filling a vacuum created by the fact that the formerly predominant provinces, Brabant and Flanders, had been reconquered by Spanish arms, Holland, a hitherto peripheral county, had become preeminent; it contributed close to 59 percent of the federal budget. Oldenbarnevelt was Holland’s chief exponent and advocate within the union setup.

In the same way, the princes of Orange found themselves almost automatically cast in the role of prime exponents of the union conception, and it is in the light of this that the ensuing conflict between Oldenbarnevelt and Maurice becomes fundamentally understandable, even without a detailed examination of its multiple origins. According to the same logic, Maurice had been made stadtholder of Holland by Oldenbarnevelt and his political friends, with the express purpose of safeguarding the province’s individuality and special position in the days (1586) when Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, as governor-general, was trying to impose his conception of centralized government on the various provinces.

Religious conflicts

During the Twelve Years’ Truce, the latent conflict crystallized around its religious facets. The astonishing success of the Netherlands’ independence movement was indissolubly connected with the fact that, sooner or later, all the provinces “remaining with the union” came to be ruled by Calvinist minorities for whom, short of renouncing their faith, there existed no possibility of reconciliation with the abjured ruler, Philip II of Spain. As for Oldenbarnevelt, like William the Silent, he too had accepted membership of the Reformed Church, but he and his fellow “regents” in Holland cherished the ideal of a church that was, though based on the Reformation in its Calvinist shape, sufficiently latitudinarian in its dogma to attract and satisfy all those who were willing to relinquish the Roman obedience. According to these rulers of Holland, the nation had rebelled against the centralizing and tyrannical tendencies of its Hispanicized overlord for the sake of freedom, including freedom from religious inquisition, whether Roman Catholic, Spanish, or Calvinist. As seen by many theologians and preachers, on the other hand, the revolt had taken place for the sake of the Reformed religion in its most uncompromisingly strict dogmatic variety. When, on the perilous issue of predestination, the antithesis became polarized in a conflict between two professors of theology at Leiden—the strict Gomarus and the more moderate Arminius—Oldenbarnevelt and the majority of the voting towns in Holland, though not Amsterdam, favoured the Arminians against the bulk of the Calvinized masses, who were staunchly Gomarist or, as they were commonly called, Counter-Remonstrant. Paradoxically, Oldenbarnevelt and his adherents even had to safeguard the principle of tolerance by somewhat intolerant measures; those preachers who, in spite of various decrees to the purpose, remained stubbornly unwilling to refrain from preaching controversial sermons were dismissed and sometimes exiled.

The religious controversy was, moreover, inextricably interwoven with the antithesis of province versus union, the Counter-Remonstrant preachers consistently referring to their religion as the God-given “cement” that kept the union together. Translated into terms of actual politics, this meant that they wanted to convoke a “national”—i.e., an interprovincial—synod, trusting (as it turned out, wrongly) that it would establish a church triumphant on the Genevan model, completely independent from all civil authorities whose worthiness and consequently whose right to govern would be judged by the churchmen. For obvious reasons, the States of Holland, led by Oldenbarnevelt, considered a synod of this kind far too risky and withheld their consent to its meeting.

Disputes with Prince Maurice

Seen in retrospect, the climax announced itself when in July 1617 Prince Maurice sided openly and defiantly with the Counter-Remonstrants. This veiled declaration of war on Oldenbarnevelt and the Holland regents’ party was answered by the so-called Sharp Resolution voted by the States of Holland on Aug. 4, 1617, which, among other things, encouraged the various towns in the province to recruit armed units of their own, not integrated in the federal army and not even subject to Maurice’s command as the province’s captain general. The states remained within their rights in taking such measures. It is understandable that a man like Maurice considered such actions an intolerable violation of the union statute. Slow-moving tactician that he was, the prince spent no less than a whole year in reinforcing his position throughout the union, until suddenly, on Aug. 29, 1618, he took Oldenbarnevelt prisoner, together with some of his closest collaborators, chief among whom was his informal “crown prince,” Hugo Grotius, then pensionary of Rotterdam.

Never in the course of Dutch history was the problem of union versus province more crudely manifest than when it materialized in the vexing question of how and by whom Oldenbarnevelt was to be tried for his life. His own thesis, unassailable at least in theory, was that, having exclusively acted as a civil servant of the sovereign province of Holland, he was responsible only to the judiciary of the province of Holland; his enemies, on the other hand, wanted to have him tried for felony against the union. As, however, no federal judiciary existed, the only possible expedient was to summon an extraordinary tribunal ad hoc; it consisted of 24 judges, by no means all of whom were qualified lawyers, and not a few of whom, besides being political opponents, were also personally antagonistic to Oldenbarnevelt. Even so, after more than half a year’s imprisonment and interrogation, he was condemned to death not for high treason, for which public opinion had been carefully propagandized, but for the “subversion” of the country’s religion and policy. In May 1619 he was beheaded at the Binnenhof, in The Hague. More than any other event in the country’s history, his execution has continued to haunt Dutch historiography and even Dutch politics.

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